The Obama administration has embarked on secret dialogue with Hizballah, debkafile reports. The first direct encounter between the CIA and Hizballah representatives took place in early March in Cyprus. Two subsequent meetings have produced initial US-Hizballah understandings for Lebanon and Syria. The administration reckons that any difficulties cropping up in those talks can be fixed by turning to Tehran. Mahmoud Abbas turned to Hamas for hs Palestinian unity pact reasoning that if the US may engage a terrorist organization in talks, so too may his own PLO.

The CIA's chief of Iran operations, Jonathan Bank, 46, was sent home on paid leave over an “open rebellion” in his department, US, Russian and Iranian media reported Tuesday, March 18. debkafile: This places in doubt the credibility of US President Barack Obama’s assurances to Israel and the Arabian Gulf leaders that they have nothing to fear from US-Iranian rapprochement. Washington, they were told, was fully abreast of Iran’s nuclear activities and would know in good time if Khamenei gave the order to build a nuclear weapon.

The US has set up a new rebel command center at Quneitra near Israeli lines on the Golan. Its officers are indigenous Bedouin Al Nuaim tribesmen, defectors from the Syrian army, and Free Syrian Army survivors. Last week, Assad’s forces ambushed Syrian rebels trained in Jordan as they crossed into Syria. Over this weekend, his troops moved in on the environs of Quneitra and captured two villages. debkafile: There is still a long way to go before a force is ready to fight for a border strip in southern Syria under US-Israeli-Jordanian control.

A major upheaval is believed in progress - not just in US intelligence networks but across the espionage industry around the world in a mad race to shut down, recover and replace the blown networks, for fear of Snowden’s revelations.

Intelligence circles in the Middle East and Europe were fully abreast of Gen. David Petraeus’s fondness for the company of strong, ambitious women like Paula Broadwell and were not against exploiting those women’s garrulity for their own ends.

The resignation of acclaimed national American hero David Petraeus as CIA Director is presented by his friends as an honorable act in the light of an extramarital affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell, 39 - and nothing else. An FBI probe of Broadwell for accessing his e-mail is cited. Neither explanation is really convincing. Republican Party faithful, smarting under Mitt Romney’s election defeat, are trying to connect it to an alleged cover-up of the circumstances surrounding the murder of four US diplomats in Benghazi.

debkafile reveals one of the CIA’s most dramatic scoops in many years, an epic disaster for Iran. Our most exclusive Iranian and intelligence sources disclose that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s personal cameraman, Hassan Golkhanban, who defected from his UN entourage in New York on Oct. 1, brought with him an intelligence treasure trove of up-to-date photographs and videos of Iran’s top leaders visiting its most sensitive and secret nuclear and missile sites. He is staying at an undisclosed address.

President Barack Obama can’t be sure the Netanyahu government won’t spring on him a surprise attack on Iran’s nuclear sites earlier than the date under discussion between them. October is now widely cited. debkafile: To forestall Israel, the CIA has spread a broad undercover network of agents across the country to pick up any clue of the IDF switching to operational mode for a strike on Iran. The US agency also leaked to AP a detailed article defaming Israel as its “No.1 counterintelligence threat” in the Middle East.

Tehran accuses the new Saudi intelligence chief, Prince Bandar bin Sultan of engineering bombing attack which killed half of Assad’s top team in Damascus. It sought to drive home the message that enemies of Assad are enemies of Iran and will be punished.

The US will not review its reconnaissance drone flights over Iran for fear they will also be downed and captured like the RQ-170. Iran could not have accomplished this coup alone because it would have required the technology for filtering through billions of coded communications relayed from Langley to satellites and cracking the coded links from Langley to one satellite and from satellite to drone.

Two CIA agents, one working undercover, were instrumental in opening the doors of Tripoli to the rebels. One was a close Qaddafi confidant called Mahmud Bin Juma'a, the second Khalifa Hafter, spent 25 year in America and is marked for high office.

DEBKA's Intelligence History files tell the story of how the plot to depose Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev 20 years ago succeeded in one sense and misfired in two: His removal marked the demise of the Soviet empire and also the unforeseen rise of Boris Yeltsin.

Although he spent four decades preparing for an enemy to oust him, Qaddafi missed a key trick: Wholesale CIA bribes for his Tripoli commanders to abandon the defenses of the city and his Bab al-Aziziya stronghold as the Western-led rebels advanced. By this trick, US troops also captured Baghdad.

US, British and Israeli secret services are getting set for Iran to retaliate for the attacks of which they are accused on its top nuclear physicists. debkafile's Iranian sources report that the last straw were the Nov. 29 attacks on two scientists in central Tehran. The Iranians are publicly fingering the US, Israel and the UK in unfolding blasts of vilification to warn them they have crossed red lines and will face the consequences.

The director of the CIA, Leon Panetta, paid secret visits to Cairo and Jerusalem Thursday, Jan. 28, to prepare the ground for expanding US military intervention in Yemen against al Qaeda strongholds, thereby opening a fresh front in the war on Islamist terror organization.
He asked for an Egyptian expeditionary force to back up US special forces and the use of Egyptian airfields as jumping off bases for US air strikes.